


I think to Live—may be a Bliss

by middlemarch



Category: Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: Anne's House of Dreams, Discovery, F/M, Honeymoon, Marriage, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2018-08-09 22:34:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7819897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A bride becomes a wife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I think to Live—may be a Bliss

She hadn’t known, she couldn’t have, how Gilbert’s face would look after he’d kissed her so many times she had happily lost count. He was not a stranger, she saw his same dear hazel eyes, his tousled curls and the angle of his jaw her hands were drawn to trace, but there was no remnant of the boy she’d known in the man in her bed, whose sure hands touched her without hesitation. She loved this man who she discovered was her husband, whose roguish humor was quenched only by the earnest intensity of his desire, who could transform abstract _delight_ into the sensation of his lips against her throat, the emerging roughness of his beard grazing her bared shoulder, the curve of her waist, the shadowed crook of her knee, the press of his clever surgeon’s hand at the back of her head, how he made specific and vibrant every part of her once hidden and unnamed. He was entirely attentive and slowed when her breath came too fast, whispered “Sweetheart!” into her ear when she felt she had lost sight of who she was, Anne Blythe more a stranger than her ardent lover who’d already told her she was the only woman he’d ever wanted-- once in a green garden and so many times since then, in letters and looks and his marriage vows, and now with his hands, his seeking mouth, his warm, striving body. 

She regretted it had taken such a long time for them to arrive here in this dark night full of spilt moonlight, where he brought her back to him again and again with the simple request, “Open your eyes, Anne,” and was looking at her with the deepest affection, the most sincere regard as he twined her red hair around his fingers, his wrist, like a knight’s secret token, and then released it with a charming, wolfish smile she’d never seen before. She’d married him without any comprehension of all he was capable of and only the least flickering sense of what she might do herself. She hadn’t known she would pull off the delicately embroidered chemise and throw it down with such fervent abandon he would laugh and tell her, “I’ll get it for you if you want it later, you needn’t leave this bed,” and that she would like to see him allow himself the caresses he’d wanted, “that I dreamt of despite myself, but now they are blessed, we are blessed together this way.” There was nothing anyone could have told her, that she could have found a way to have told herself, to prepare her for the way her affection and her love made her lust a necessity, a benediction she might have thought if she were writing about it at her desk, but in the bed that had become the whole world, more beautiful than any silvery shore, more enticing that any twilit copse, she was making such discoveries and he was as well and only loved her the better for every one. 

She hadn’t known what it would be to wake and see him, so young again except for the way he lay in the bed, the sheet draped over him evoking darkly handsome Dionysus, not distant Apollo or sprightly Hermes. The heat of his hand was compelling as a heart-beat against her hip. She hadn’t known she could wake to a day full of sunshine and the fragrance of an unexplored garden, the sky deigning to let the birches’ branches break up its perfect blue, could wake and never wish to leave the room, the bed, the arms of a man she must greet as someone she had always and never known, and who would chuckle when she told him all this, the faintest hint of the passion he’d shown her in every sound. He would stop laughing when she put his other hand against her heart, as bold as she knew to be and she would hear him gasp, “Lovely, Anne” or “lovely Anne” and she would only remember to ask hours later when he was waiting for her to wake at noon and just about to go in search of the first picnic she’d ever had among goose-down pillows and a Jacob’s ladder quilt Rachel Lynde had given her as a wedding gift.

**Author's Note:**

> A little romantic vignette from the honeymoon, where Anne grapples with what intimacy is like. I tried to keep it as flowery as LMM is wont to do and referenced Hester Gray's garden and Mrs. Lynde for good measure. I think the transition from their courtship to their marriage would have thrown Anne for a loop, a good loop :) 
> 
> The title is from Emily Dickinson, as usual.


End file.
